Oh I'm still working! Mini fundates (those are like updates, but FUN!):

On Saturday, I streamed game-playing like most Saturdays, but this time I played VR games. It was fascinating and failed in many terrible ways. But there was also fun to be had. If you're curious, check out the video here. Fast-forward a lot, there are a lot of downtimes where games aren't working, but Superhot VR is certainly one awesome VR game, as well as Beat Saber, which I am totally addicted to. Another one I really enjoyed is Scanner Sombre, but that one was not able to stream, it's just showing a still image the whole time I play it.

Don't forget I also stream game development every Tuesday and Thursday, which means today! I hope to be doing so at 2pm Central Time, so show up. Streaming is at my Twitch page.

I am still working on the shop in Robot Wants It All, and I recently shared an image of the confirmation screen on Instagram, which shows that the unit of currency in the game is "Moneys". I made that up on the spot, but I'm really starting to enjoy the idea. What do you think? Stupid, or too stupid?

The Indie Indie Conversation continues on Youtube. I'm not going to link it here because it's not family friendly (mostly because of me...), but if you're interested in indie developers whining about their work and life in general, look it up! It was reborn about a month ago after 5 years away.

There's a squirrel in my yard with a monkey tail.

I know we said a long time ago we'd be getting testers for Robot soon, but we're still in that space where things are just too in flux and broken. We're working on all the general stuff now, like menus and game saves, instead of adding the last 3 games in (Robot Wants Kitty, Puppy, and Fishy are basically done), so once we have a stable core, we will begin to get testers before adding in those last 3 games. I don't know when that will be, but keep on following the game!

This week, I got really down and dirty in the code and artwork for robot's shopping experience. I wanted to make something a little different. It's not that different - it's still just a bunch of icons and each one costs a certain amount of money (not real money! Toy money! No IAP), and you click to buy. There is a "tree" to it, like a skill tree, where you need to buy certain things before other things, but you have the freedom to work your way around pretty much how you like. The idea of the tree is that it's more exciting to progress towards what you want instead of seeing a list of everything imaginable and just picking your favorite (fun at first, and then progressively more dull as the remaining options are less and less appealing!).

I also spent some time considering a Mortal Kombat style shop. I'm really fond of the Krypt system they had in that game - all the items are there to purchase, but you don't know what they are until you buy. It's kind of like gambling, but you always win (just not always as much as you had hoped). That's still an option here, but I think we'll stick with knowing what you're buying. I'm still going to keep the items that are not available to buy secret until you unlock them though!

I also thought about having some items locked behind achievements or other goals. That's still on the table, we'll see.

I'm proud of how this incredibly massive layout looks - it's like some weird alien space object made of TVs. Just the layout makes it almost like there's a fisheye effect going on, it's almost an optical illusion where the stuff in the edges seems to curve away. It also does a cool animation when it loads in, which my Twitch viewers know about (Check me out there on Tuesdays and Thursdays if you want sneak peeks of this game! Also on Saturdays I stream playing games).

Fun fact: the cursor is Kitty inside an ejection pod. We've got full controller support in this game, which is tricky on this screen... no easy way to navigate that noise with a controller, so I just copped out and made the controller move the cursor around. That's always a little clunky to me, but it's just for this screen. Our other menus function in the traditional up/down/left/right system from days of NES past.

Now the real question is what to do with that extra space on the edges of the screen... oh yes, I have ideas. We can't waste a single pixel of potential metagame!

I don't have a lot to report, or rather I do have a lot, but it's all little things. We continue to grind away on Robot Wants It All, and it's going really well. But there are constantly things that feel like they need to be done before we have any testers.

Right now, we're neck-deep in save games. We initially had classic saves like the Flash games did - it would remember the basic stuff like what powerups you had, and just put you at the last save point (and penalize your time, so it was like you had just died). This turned out to be a bit of a problem with various game elements, like the Mutators that add randomly placed things onto the map. So now we've moved on to the most hardcore of save features: full game states, like emulators use. Assuming this all works, it will save every last detail of your game every time you exit, so you can continue from that exact moment.

Which leads me to the biggest problem we face with this game, and it's one that I fear has no solution at all: cheating. Obviously, it's a single player game, so to a degree, we don't care about cheating. But there are online high scores, and those high score boards are 100% guaranteed to be filled with cheaters, and become completely useless to any real players. It's trivial to cheat at an offline single-player game, it takes literally less than a minute to set up a "game shark" style software to lock your time from changing, or to simply set your time to zero right before you finish, or any number of other cheats. We could spend weeks trying to plug every imaginable hole there, but it's pointless. In the end, what you have is a piece of code that is in the hands of the player, so the player can do whatever they want to it. There is no way to stop them from just removing any checks or limitations you place. Imagine handing a padlock and a key to the same person, and trying to figure out a way to keep them from unlocking it.

That problem has been a constant thorn in my brain for a couple of weeks. My original solution is probably the only good one: limit the leaderboards to only show people who are on your friends list. I don't like it because it removes the worldwide competition and the fun of trying to beat the top players, but as soon as you introduce real competition, everyone will cheat anyway, so it is fundamentally unsolvable. I suppose if there develops a community of people who are serious about speedrunning these games, they will have to share videos of their runs to prove them. There are a lot of technical solutions we can use to try to verify scores (or even manually check them, but that's completely insane), but in the end, there will always be ways around them, and they could cause our leaderboards to use an unreasonable amount of data - we do have something like 8000 separate leaderboards for every combination of levels and mutators.

So yeah, didn't mean to turn this into a big rant about high score cheating, but that is clearly the big thing on my mind. I'm pretty much ignoring it as we continue to develop though, so I can focus on actually creating fun content like this...

The video above is showing you a side-by-side shot of 3 of our Gameplay Mutators in Robot Wants It All. On the left side, you see normal gameplay. On the right side, you see me plowing through (painfully) the same section of the game, but I have 3 Mutators active: Hyper Fighting, Caffeine, and Accelerator. The names give you a hint, but other than that I won't tell you exactly what they do. The combined effect is pretty obvious though! And boy is it hard to play.

So as you may surmise from this, Robot Wants It All includes Mutators as a feature. Instead of playing through the game in the normal way, you can equip up to 3 different Mutators, from a list of 12, to modify your game experience. Some are small changes, others are absolutely dastardly (or wondrous, depending). You decide how to play! And when you do, your high scores go onto a specific high score table just for the combination of Mutators you've picked. So if you do foolishly attempt playing the way I did above, you'll only be competing with everybody else using that same combination of Mutators. And they will be getting terrible times, I can assure you - but they'll be getting them quickly, that's for sure.

Not the greatest blog entry ever, but I thought I should mention that we're holding off on adding testers right now. We've got the game set up on Steam as you saw earlier, but we don't yet have a high score table. I think that's gonna be key, because we really want to know the kinds of times people get, in terms of how accurate the ports are and how balanced the different characters are (the what now?!). So we want to hold off until that's all ready to go. But keep us in mind, because hey it's a nice way to get a free copy of a game! All you have to do is play it. And hopefully tell us about the bugs you find.

While Anthony works on porting the old Robot Wants games into Robot Wants It All, I've recently started working on Robot's new adventure (among other things like making the alternate maps)! The big twist for Robot's latest journey is that this time, it's a stealth game. Or at least, that's the plan - I guess we'll see if that works well!

So here are some new funky tiles, and the dreaded Deathbot. As you can see, it's got a scanning beam, so the idea is that if it sees you, you are DEAD. Hence the need for stealth.

Incidentally, I spent almost my entire development Twitch stream yesterday trying to get the stupid laser beams working, and what's pictured here is finally the real working beam, rendered as a rotated sprite rather than using a line-drawing function. It's much nicer, and best of all it actually works. If you saw that stream (you still can for the next week or so, it archives streams), you can see real programming in action - what seemed like a super simple thing evolved into a series of web searches, diving deep into library code, barking up wrong trees, and so much more before I finally just had to do something slightly different than my original plan. In the end, I actually ran out of time. The beams you see here were developed the following day, after throwing out the work I did during the stream (not all of it, just the rendering).

So yeah, that's how programming works! Dead ends, incomprehensible failures, changing goalposts, sleeping on it, and anything that seems easy will KILL YOU. Like a Deathbot.

Look, it's available on Steam! Wait, no it's not. This is just the test version that we can see internally. So don't go looking in the Steam store, but we are working on getting the setup going so that testers will be able to get it through Steam just like a regular game, and automatically update even. It's really cool actually... as you can see, we even have 2 achievements already! We're working on high score tables right now.

Overall, the status is this: Robot Wants Kitty, Puppy, and Fishy are basically complete in their original form. Easy and Remix maps are done for Kitty, Easy and half of a Remix map are done for Puppy, and no bonus maps for Fishy yet. So Ice Cream and Banner remain to be ported. Also, the new, secret Robot adventure has just barely gotten started. If you watched my Twitch stream on Thursday, you could've seen me creating it! Here's pretty much all that we've got so far, just some new tiles (and the fact that it runs):

So I guess it takes place on some kind of alien planet with purple dirt and yellow grass. More to come!

It's amazing how much our world has changed in the past 25 years. Also amazing is the sensation of realizing that this year is the 25th anniversary of the release of SPISPOPD (also of DOOM, but really, who remembers that game?). To celebrate (about 9 months too soon - Dec 10, 1993 was the release date), I've uploaded SPISPOPD to Itch.io for your perusal. Most people won't be able to figure out how to install it or run it. It is not something that will work out of the box, at all. But of note is the fact that the legendary SpisFAQ is also available on that page. Check it out, as it's full of incredibly important knowledge from 25 years ago.

For a quick run-down on playing SPISPOPD, if you are technically inclined (this is info for SMASH247.ZIP - SPISEDIT.ZIP is similar, but more complex to run): You need to open up the zip file, unzip SPIS.ZIP into a folder, then unzip VOC.ZIP into a folder named VOC inside that folder. Then run DosBox, mount the folder as a drive in dosbox (type "mount c d:\myspisfolder"), go to the drive in DosBox (type "C:"), and then run the game by typing SMASH. I think that's it. Sound most likely won't work, but by gum the music sure will! You will never forget the music. It'll make you long for Stockboy's chart-topping tunes.

Anyway, I am nearing the end of old games to upload to Itch.io! Just so you know, the last remaining non-flash games I have (unless there are others buried somewhere I can find) are Ninja Kitty Vs. The Nukebots, Medusa's Lament, Rise of the Owls, Scarecrow: Heart of Straw, and Castle Smash. So those are coming soon. Then I guess I have to start making new games? Nah, I'll just figure out how to share the flash games.

Still working on Robot Wants It All! At this point, the first 3 games are pretty much done, in their initial state - Robot can get Kitty, Puppy, and Fishy. We're working on a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff as well. I mentioned the alternate maps in the previous update (and I've worked on one live on my Twitch stream!). There are 2 alternate maps for Kitty, and 1.5 for Puppy (getting there!). I haven't started on alternate maps for Fishy yet. That's gonna be rough seeing how it's so much bigger than the first two games.

I could talk about a new feature like I totally said I would, now that the site is finally back, but I think I'll leave that for next time. I'm just glad to have my blog back. Other Robot tidbits: we're working on getting a testing situation set up, we should be looking for testers in a couple of weeks (hopefully); I will share a new feature next time I discuss the game; and you should stop by the Twitch stream on Tuesdays and Thursdays (time to be determined, but I tweet and instagram each time I do it, or just follow me on Twitch), as I do development of the game live on there!

I'm not sure if it works 100%, so consider this the beta test. The Hamumu blog is here again. Click it, read it, smile and scratch your chin thoughtfully.

If you find any errors, let me know. Perhaps by posting a comment, unless the error is that the comments aren't working.

In other news, I am now streaming on Twitch approximately 3x weekly (development twice, and playing games once). I'm aiming for Tues/Thurs/Sat, and mixing up the times on them so different people have a chance to sit in. It's nothing special, I just hang out and work/play on whatever I'm doing, but I like to do so where I can interact with you all, so join in and chat away. You can see Robot Wants It All in action. Or Overwatch.